10 Ways to Make Money with your Digital Camera

1. Real Estate - Photograph homes as a paid service to realtors in your area. Since most newspapers and 'home for sale' magazines feature photographs of the homes that are for sale, your services can allow the realtors to spend more time earning their living instead of taking pictures. Also, with the popularity of the internet, most real estate agencies have websites with featured homes or searchable listings. These websites usually need good photographs as well.

2. Amateur sporting events - elementary, junior high, or high school sporting events offer a great opportunity for taking photographs of peoples kids in action. By getting good shots of their kids, you'll be able to offer great photographs to proud parents who don't own cameras, or forgot to bring them, or didn't have the great shots that you got.

3. Digital Image Collections - bundle hundreds of photographs onto a single CD rom and sell as a royalty-free package for web designers and graphic artists that don't want to take time from their areas of interest in order to take photographs.

4. How-To Projects - photograph the progression from start to finish of a particular project and put a few explanations with it and then offer it for sale as a 'How To ....." guide.

5. Insurance Records - offer your photography services to property owners who want to document their possessions for insurance purposes. Offer the final photographs on a CD. An add on business would be to have a written itemization for all the items, which could be included with the CD.

6. Child Safety Identification - not all parents have recent photographs of their children. By offering photography services as part of a Child Safety ID business you are doing a service to improve children's safety. Additional services could include recording fingerprints and a hair sample.

7. Digital Image Website - by putting high quality or interesting photos on a website you can create a cyber-gallery from which people can by prints. Many online photo-processors want you to do this because it means additional income for them too. Just upload, email, or send the online photo-processor your digital images and arrange them into albums. Many photo-processor's provide online tools so that you don't have to build your own website, or know how to run expensive photo editing software. Every time someone buys one of your photos from your gallery, the photo-processor makes a buck, and so do you.

8. Publish Church Directories - most churches want directories of the families and other members of their congregation or parish. By using your digital camera, careful documentation, and a some software you can create a church directory that include a photo of each family or individual, as well as their contact information. Your directory doesn't just have to be a printed out version, it could also be an online version. However, due to privacy concerns, some churches may not want their members contact information to be publicly available via the world wide web.

9. Selling Scrapbooks of Events - if you're a Scout leader or a participant in a family or class reunion, you could be the person who takes pictures of the big event, compiles it into a easy-reading visual scrapbook, and sells it to others who were at the event. Everyone wants a souvenir and reminder of a good time, and as memories fade, a quality scrapbook would be something most people appreciate.

10. Freelance photographer - go to public events and take photographs of the goings-on. Immediately contact local newspapers and magazines about the availability of your photographs and work out the details of how they prefer to look at the images you've captured. You never can tell when a publication didn't know about the event in the first place.